Movies opening this week

“Drive” — Like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, Ryan Gosling is simply known as the Driver. He’s a stoic loner who does exactly what the title suggests. By day, he’s a stunt driver, flipping cop cars for Hollywood productions. By night, he evades the police as a getaway driver for armed robberies, as he does in the film’s tense, nearly wordless opening sequence.

No identity, no backstory. The Driver simply exists, moving from one job to the next without making any pesky emotional attachments. Gosling’s masculine, minimalist approach makes him mysteriously compelling.

His demeanor is the perfect fit for the overall approach from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (“Bronson”); cool and detached, “Drive” feels like an homage to early Michael Mann. Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman and a scene-stealing Albert Brooks, playing against type, are among the strong supporting cast. R for strong, brutal, bloody violence, language and some nudity. 100 minutes.

“I Don’t Know How She Does It” — When you’re a wife and working mother, there’s this inescapable, self-imposed pressure to do everything right all the time. The idea of having it all — a great job and a loving family, a toned body and a sane mind — is as appealing as it is elusive.

Douglas McGrath’s comedy, based on the best-selling novel of the same name, gets that dynamic, that incessant juggling act, and the ways in which we self-flagellate in trying to perfect it. This is not exactly a new concept but it’s increasingly prevalent, and McGrath finds just the right tone in depicting that.

It doesn’t help that Sarah Jessica Parker, as the film’s star, chimes in early and often with voiceovers that sound exactly like the kinds of observations she used to make as Carrie on “Sex and the City,” the role with which she will be eternally, intrinsically tied. PG-13 for adult situations and language. 91 minutes.

“Restless” — The title must apply to the director. In more than a dozen films over 25 years, Gus Van Sant has often turned to stories of adolescence, young death and melancholy.

In “Restless,” he returns to these themes, but the material isn’t up to his talents, and the effect is of a filmmaker searching for a vessel. Teenager Enoch Brae (Henry Hopper, the son of Dennis) is adrift after the deaths of his parents.

While crashing a funeral, he meets Annabel Cotton (Mia Wasikowska), a bright, unusually undaunted girl who knows cancer will kill her in three months. The two become fast companions and lovers, bound together by a refusal to acknowledge death’s power.

At its worst, the film is sentimental and cloying, a pretty picture of young, pretty death, outfitted handsomely in autumn scarfs and cloche hats. PG-13 for thematic elements and brief sensuality. 95 minutes.

“Straw Dogs” — The setting has been moved from the British countryside to the swamps of Mississippi, and the lead actors got better looking, but Rod Lurie’s film is essentially identical to the 1971 Sam Peckinpah thriller he’s remaking.

Names, graphic details, bits of dialogue, even a parallel editing structure that unfolds during a pivotal moment — they’re all here. And the themes and messages that were problematic in the original exist here as well.

It’s a movie that purports itself to be an indictment of violence, a critical exploration of the depraved depths to which man can sink when pushed. Yet Lurie (“The Contender,” ‘’Nothing But the Truth”), as writer and director, depicts this brutality in vivid, glorious detail, to the point of almost fetishizing it. R for strong, brutal violence including a sexual attack, menace, some sexual content and pervasive language. 109 minutes.